THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAQ: NEGOTIATIONS; CHARTER TALKS IN IRAQ REACH BREAKING POINT

By DEXTER FILKINS and JAMES GLANZ; Steven R. Weisman contributed reporting from Washington for this article.

Published: August 26, 2005

Talks over the Iraqi constitution reached a breaking point on Thursday, with a parliamentary session to present the document being canceled and President Bush personally calling one of the country's most powerful Shiite leaders in an effort to broker a last-minute deal.

Mr. Bush intervened when some senior Shiite leaders said they had decided to bypass their Sunni counterparts, as well as Iraqi lawmakers, and send the document directly to Iraqi voters for their approval.

The calls by Shiite leaders to ignore the Sunnis' request for changes to the draft constitution provoked threats from the Sunnis that they would urge their people to reject the document when it goes before voters in a national referendum in October.

At day's end, American officials in Washington declared that the Iraqis had made ''substantial and real progress'' toward a deal on the constitution. And senior Iraqi leaders said they would make a last-ditch effort on Friday to strike a deal.

But after so many days of fruitless negotiations, some senior political leaders here suggested that time had run out.

''There are still some negotiations, but if we don't have any compromise, then that's it,'' said Sheik Khalid al-Atiyya, a Shiite negotiator. ''We will go to the election to vote on it.''

A decision by the Shiites to move ahead without the Sunnis would be a considerable blow to efforts by the Bush administration to bring the leaders of the Sunni minority into the negotiations over the constitution.

Mr. Bush and American officials here have expressed hope that bringing the Sunnis into the drafting of the constitution could help coax them into the political mainstream, and ultimately begin to undercut support for the guerrilla insurgency. The Sunnis largely boycotted the parliamentary elections in January.

In recent weeks, Sunni leaders across north and central Iraq have begun telling their communities to register for and vote in the Oct. 15 referendum on the constitution and in the parliamentary elections scheduled for December. That trend could be endangered if Sunni leaders are not part of a deal on the constitution.

Indeed, the events of Thursday raised the prospect that the Sunnis would try to reject the constitution when it goes before the voters. Under the rules agreed to last year, a two-thirds majority voting against the constitution in any three of Iraq's 18 provinces would send the document down to defeat. The Sunnis are thought to constitute a majority in three provinces.

By Thursday night, Sunni leaders were declaring that they had been victimized by the majority Shiites, and they were already making plans to sink the constitution at the polls.

''We will call on people to say no to this constitution,'' said Kamal Hamdoun, a Sunni leader who is head of the Iraqi Bar Association. ''This constitution was written by the powerful people, not by the people.''

''This constitution achieved the ambitions of the people who are in power,'' he added.

The Sunni leaders adamantly oppose language in the constitution that could allow the Shiites to create a vast autonomous region in the oil-rich southern part of the country. In the current draft, the constitution says each province may form its own federal region and join with others.

In the debate over autonomous regions, the Kurds, who already have one such region in the north, largely stood on the sidelines. But the Sunnis say that such an arrangement could cripple the Iraqi state, and that the Shiite autonomous region would probably fall under the sway of their Shiite-dominated neighbor, Iran.

Despites their protests, there are widespread doubts about the sincerity of the Sunni negotiators. Most of the 15 members of the Sunni negotiating committee were members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, and there is a growing sense among Shiite leaders that their primary goal is to block any agreement at all.

In any case, the Shiite leadership has been ardent in its desire to set up a Shiite-dominated autonomous region, particularly Abdul Aziz Hakim, a cleric and the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. As advocated by Mr. Hakim, the Shiite region would comprise nine of Iraq's 18 provinces, nearly half the nation's population and its richest oil fields.

Mr. Hakim and many of the senior members of his group, the Supreme Council, lived for many years in Iran and even fought on the Iranian side during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980's. The Supreme Council is suspected by American officials of receiving large amounts of assistance from the Iranian government.

The effort by the Shiites to bypass the Sunnis began Thursday afternoon, when they canceled a meeting of the Iraqi National Assembly, which was set to gather, and possibly vote, on the final draft constitution. While many Iraqi leaders first interpreted that decision as simply a delay, the Shiites made it clear that they were considering bypassing the Assembly altogether and of forgoing any further changes to the document.

Because the majority Shiites dominate the National Assembly, there is little the Sunnis can do to stop them from writing whatever constitution they choose.